THE RANT

Talk about a trip! I was watching the news the other morning and screaming with laughter about my favorite person, Mr. George Bush. Poor thing, his ratings have dipped so low and he’s now so unpopular, even among his own herd, that he finally just gave up and ran off to — drum roll, please — Mongolia! The only sitting U.S. president ever to visit the country. I guess he figured since a majority of the population is nomadic and lives in tents, there wouldn’t be quite as many protesters screaming at him in the streets and causing riots like in every other place he visits. This was after stopping in Alaska to once again appear in that G.I Joe military costume he likes to don when talking about his war in Iraq — a war I could swear I heard him refer to as “cirrus bidness.” While addressing the good folks in Alaska, he referred to them as “Arctic Warriors,” no less, and told them to “please be seated unless you don’t have a seat.” He can turn a phrase! I’m just glad he didn’t tell them to pick their seats or offer to push in their stools. Of course, he droned on and on and on about why this war is good and how “we have killed or captured nearly all of those directly responsible for the September 11th attacks.” I guess he kind of forgot about that one minor guy, Osama bin Laden. He went on say, “We have killed or captured several of bin Laden’s most senior deputies, including the man who planned the U.S.” The man who planned the U.S? That is fabulous. And this comes from the White House Press Office transcript of his speech. I had no idea we’d killed George Washington. Of course, Bush used the speech to remind everyone about how Saddam Hussein gassed his own people back in the 1980s. He just forgot to mention one little detail, about his father and Ronald Reagan sending Donald Rumsfeld to sell Saddam the gas he used to commit that heinous act. Oops! Too bad that photo of Rummy and Saddam shaking hands got sent around the Internet. But Mongolia. That’s a pretty remote place to visit just to find someone who’ll talk to you. No offense to anyone from Mongolia, but really. When Bush first announced the trip, my main hope was that he wouldn’t say something like, “Weeeell, you Mongoloids don’t look nearly as bad I figerred!” Or, “You people call this barbecue?” What he did say to them, however, was just as embarrassing. He told Mongolia’s Eagle television, “I will say on your TV screens, there should be no corruption in government, that one of the foundations of any government is the ability for the people to trust the government itself.” This, on the heels of the news that all of those oil company executives lied to Congress when they said they had not participated in Dick Cheney’s secret energy task force. And on the heels of the speech Cheney gave chastising the patriotism of anyone who doubted the administration’s integrity. The look on his face was like someone getting a colonoscopy without anesthesia — or advance warning. Cheney is such a charming fella! He is my second-favorite person now. I would love to wake up to that cheerful face and contagious grin every morning. I hope he doesn’t give up his day job to play the sunshine character on those Jimmy Dean sausage commercials. Here’s an idea for interrogating suspected terrorists to get better results than what we’re getting now by threatening them with dogs and lions and sleep deprivation and hanging them by their wrists. Just put them in a room with the Dick and superglue their foreheads together and see how long they last without spilling the beans. I’d say you’d have Osama’s head on a platter in a matter of hours. The Iraqi insurgents would run like scared little children, and we could finally get the hell out of there and return to some kind of normal existence. It’s one way the Dick might finally be able to do us some good.